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The average MMORPG gamer spends 22 hours per week playing. What does it take to keep players engaged and coming back? What elements are crucial to creating and sustaining a successful MMORPG? A new study titled “Player Commitment to Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG): An Integrated Model” seeks to identify these issues and provide game developers with insights.
More than ten game guilds participated in the study. The guilds were located in major cities throughout Korea including Seoul, Busan, and Daejeon. MMORPG gaming is popular with university students and more than half of the sample came from Seoul, Busan, and Daejeon since they have large student populations.
Some of the guilds were distributed across the various cities, but some of the guilds were location-based. For example, classmates from the same guild and the same university would get together and go to the same cyber café.
In the case of some location-based guilds, after each of the guild members of a particular guild finished his or her real-world work, they would meet at the same café in the evening to play the game together.
Here are the major reasons that MMORPG players in Korea prefer cyber café even though they have their own home or laptop computers:
1. There is greater social interaction because they can play the game in close proximity to their fellow guild members in the cafe.
2. The computers in the cafe are more powerful compared to their laptops and the bandwidth is better.
3. The subscription fee in the cafe is lower than at home. For example, for World of Warcraft, personal users have to pay subscription fee to Blizzard to connect to the battle net. But when users connect to the battle net at a cyber café, they don’t have to pay a subscription fee. The cyber café pays instead. Users only pay the cyber café usage fee. As noted in item 2, cyber cafés have better computers, higher-speed connections, lower-fees, and the players get to interact with other guild members.
We also wanted some level of control over the technical environment. The computers in the cafés are generally more powerful than home laptops and desktops. We wanted to make sure that the computer memory, CPU power and the graphics card were sufficiently adequate to control the character and play the game as a reasonable level of performance. Cyber cafés are fairly standardized in Korea so the players compete in a somewhat similar technical environment.
The study, forthcoming in the International Journal of Electronic Commerce, considers why some massive multiplayer online role-playing games such asWorld of Warcraft or Star Wars Galaxies, command legions of loyal players while others struggle to gain a following.
The question is important to developers because gameplay styles that keep players coming back are key to building a successful MMORPG and to increasing profits. Online gaming is part of daily life for players of all ages and backgrounds; revenues from games on Facebook and other social networking platforms are expected to reach $2 billion in 2012, according to the study.
The study followed a group of 173 players who were part of a large MMORPG community. It examined whether two different game-playing strategies were successful in producing loyal players.
We had a chance to talk with Sanders about some of the specifics behind the study.
Q: What specific steps should game developers take to make their products more competitive? What, based on your studies, are the most important aspects to gain and retain a loyal following?
1. Try to encourage control and give the players the opportunity to control. Players need to exert and have the ability to control their environment. They need incentives, motivations and prompting to control their character and provide higher powered weapons and armor. This will help them control their environment as the game increases in difficulty.
2. Interaction among the players and the guild members is critical. Games need social media in the form of online internet cafés and Facebook type of environments so that players can interact more effectively. There are some games that are very good at this, such as the Korean game Mabinogi.
3. Hacking tools will kill a game. Games must be monitored carefully. A game can be destroyed through a small hacking tool. Think of the book Reamde by Neal Stephenson for a great read on the topic MMORPGS, hacking, security and suspense. That book published in 2012 is a fictional primer on the concept of virtual worlds.
The first step is that the player needs to have feelings of control over character and environment. If player perceives a higher level of control over their character this will in turn lead to strong psychological ownership of the character.
If a players that can effectively manage the attributes of their character and control their environment by having some level of success in achieving goals and fighting the enemy will have greater feelings of ownership and also exhibit game loyalty because players that can control a game exhibit strong psychological ownership and this in turn leads to e-loyalty as players become locked-in to the MMORPG.
A primary goal of most MMORPGs is to acquire objects to exert control over the character and the virtual world. However, because some character classes or skill sets can easily defeat characters of other classes or skills in many MMORPGs, developers should consider a skill-point character development system over a class-based system to balance play and to provide an opportunity for any character class engaged in combat to win.
Developers should also provide equal incentives for players to engage in one-on-one combat, a large-scale siege of a castle or large-scale battles for territory. For players on both sides, large-scale battles are critical for establishing shared norms related to us-versus-them or good-versus-evil scenarios.
Dynamic and interactive game environments motivate players to learn how to control and to ultimately have feelings of ownership towards their character, their guild and the game itself.
In World of Warcraft, players become attached to their avatars because of the time and emotional effort that they invest in their characters, and their avatars reflect the player’s identity and embody the player in the virtual world.
Developers should focus on increasing vibrant social experiences by emphasizing three fundamental features of virtual worlds:
1. player avatars,
2. collaborative action and cooperation through guilds,
3. personal communication.
“The graphics and technology behind the games have improved over the years, but developers haven’t made much effort to understand what makes MMORPG players really commit to one game over another,” says Sanders.
“Most prior research has focused on the addictive nature of these games. Our study looked at how to make them more competitive in the marketplace. Research on loyalty has found that increasing customer retention by as little as 5 percent can increase profits by 25 to 95 percent. So for the developers who create these games, finding gameplay styles that keep players coming back is key to building a successful MMORPG—and business.”
